


Red With His Wounded

by sanxiu



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Bickering, Bloodplay, F/F, Sex Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:41:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22938847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanxiu/pseuds/sanxiu
Summary: “Just hit your carotid artery properly this time.”“Miss one shot out of a hundred, and suddenly everybody’s a critic.”
Relationships: Lady/Trish (Devil May Cry)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13
Collections: Writing Rainbow Red





	Red With His Wounded

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HostisHumaniGeneris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/gifts).



The world keeps on spinning, with or without Dante, with or without Vergil, with or without any of them.

Trish wonders how he’s doing, all the way down there, playing gatekeeper with the husk of the Qliphoth, beating a lifetime of violent frustrations and absolute adorations out onto his brother’s body. Of course she wonders: she has a heart, now, and a care; her share of her inheritance from Dante, handed over long before he went somewhere there was a good chance he wasn’t coming back from.

But wondering doesn’t keep the lights on, and it doesn’t pay to keep her in the life she’s become accustomed to; lavish and decadent, gorging on the glut of every little obscene luxury the human world has conjured up for itself. So Trish wonders, but not all that much, not beyond how many times the brothers have killed each other, which one’s pulling ahead at any given time in the body count. There’s work to do, and people to save, provided the price is just right.

Lady sticks around, after, which is nice in its own ways. Dante had brought them together, in a sense, sure, but the force of him had never kept them there. Lady is individualistic, resourceful, willful. She came and went, much like Trish, treating Devil May Cry like an open door, a port in the storm. Knew what she could take and had the spine to ask for help whenever she took on more. Trish had liked her fire back when Lady had been on her trail for a payout; likes her fire all the more, now, that she can warm herself beside it without fear of getting burned.

She expects their inevitable drift, the separation that has come countless times before. It’s always one of them who ends up restless, or both of them, and goes off chasing the scratch to an itch they can’t name. But the days drawl out to weeks, then to months, on and on and on, with their only constant becoming Lady, Lady at her side, Lady somewhere, always, close by. Sometimes, Trish will catch a glimpse of her she’s not meant to see, out on the field, in their office, everywhere in-between: Lady’s gaze heavy where it rests on her, aflame with expectation, fierce with its intensity. As if she’s waiting for Trish to do something even she can’t put the words to. As if she’s bracing for Trish to fall short, to bail out, of a challenge she’s set down between them but kept the rules to her chest.

So Trish stays, in part for the spite of it, to see if Lady won’t cave in first. But the other part is: she stays because Lady is there covering her side when a job goes bad, because Lady is there to wake up to, slung out on a cramped couch after they’ve both had half the life beaten out of them. There to eat shit food, there to state her opinions on the clothes and jewellery Trish buys, there to thumb lipstick from the swell of Trish’s bottom lip when she’s drawn outside the line of it. Trish doesn’t feel the urge to look for something that Lady doesn’t already give with her company, and so she stays, feeding into the wide circle they’re toeing around one another, the careful plotting towards a conclusion not yet mapped out.

* * *

It goes like this:

There’s a job, something to with cultists, demons, rituals. Always something, always the same, always beneath her talents and unworthy of her notice. It takes a lot out of Trish not to yawn loudly down the receiver, but not a lot out of her to roll her eyes and mime hanging herself when Lady comes to perch on the edge of the desk. 

It’ll take them more time to make their way there than it’ll take them to get it done. She gives the caller their fee, enough zeroes tacked on the end to act as a deterrent to further wasting her time. When they accept— well. Trish can hardly say no, can she, not when it’ll keep Morrison off their backs for a month on its own merits.

Things like this always go like this:

The job is an utter cock-up. Either their client has played them, or hadn’t managed to figure out there was a trapdoor at the rock bottom of their problem. The truth doesn’t matter to Trish when the outcome is that it’s got her and Lady bailed up in a sacrificial chamber. Their only way out is sealed tight, runes still turgid beneath the tantalising spray of blood that Trish had taken every pleasure painting them over with.

“Sweetheart,” Trish calls out. She is trying for light, trying for playful, but the blinding hot boil of her frustrated rage beneath her skin warps it on her tongue, makes it come out in a harsh, gravelly rush. “How fast can you come?”

Lady chokes on her own breath and spit. Good. One of the better reactions on the scale of what Trish was expecting. “What?”

Trish sets her hands to the task of hauling each of the dead bodies up and dragging what is left of them to stack up against the threshold, like a morbid floodbank. She needs to keep herself busy to keep herself collected through the maelstrom of her vehemence at their predicament. “I take hours,” Trish says, as if it’s an adequate explanation. As if it’s any consolation. “I don’t want to be in here that long. Do you?”

“Wait,” Lady stammers out. Trish can hear her grapple the lip of the altar with both hands as she drags herself up from her kneel. “Walk me back a few steps. Is this— the door? That configuration needs blood to satisfy its conditions.”

She takes a step closer, and then another. Trish really wishes she would stop, would stand still and answer Trish and not make this all the more complicated by asking her questions and voicing her observations. “It’s inverted to Euphoria. Rounded out characters, smoother lines. Doesn’t distinguish between come and blood, so long as it gets spilled.”

Lady slides up closer, her fluttering hands finally coming to perch on her own hips, face tipped up. She doesn’t even flinch when Trish swings a torso against the wall by its arm, the thready sinew tether of the limb snapping free from the force of the impact.

“Then, couldn’t you just bleed out until it unlocks?” Lady asks, completely reasonable and absolutely ignorant of the fact that Trish has already thought of that. That had crossed her mind the moment she’d spun around and gotten her fill of the closed door, seconds after she’d made the choice that had gotten them both trapped here in the first place; when she had broken away from their fleeing enemy, completely by instinct, to shield Lady from his parting shot with the span of her back.

“I’ll take hours for that, too,” Trish says, and leaves it at that. It’s too much to say the rest, how she doesn’t want to leave their way out to only that, doesn’t want to put them in a position where she could potentially be too weak to help out if they end up re-ambushed and freshly outflanked.

Lady sighs out, scuffing her boot against the stone floor. “Shit,” she replies. “Fuck. All right, then. Just— just don’t look, okay? It’s. Fuck.”

It’s an agreeable condition. Very agreeable. Trish nods her assent, and doesn’t turn around, doesn’t need any visual confirmation when she can hear Lady’s breath hitch, tight and hot and hard in the swell of her chest. “Get on the altar. I’ll join you when you have a few under your belt, speed up the process. Unless all that blood will end up turning you off.”

“Fuck, shut up,” Lady snaps, half laughing and fully hysterical, “you don’t get to talk like that when you’ve never bought me dinner.”

“I’ve bought you dinner,” Trish fires back, mouth curling. “More than once.” Her mood is gentling, the roar of her blood tapering out to a dull, distant thunder, heralding a storm that has now drifted on overhead.

“Not for something like this, you haven’t.” Lady steps away, and Trish listens to her plod back across the room, palms rubbing down her sides. “I hate cultists. I don’t want to take any more jobs with fucking cultists."

“I hear you.” Humour’s good. Humour’s easy. Humour takes the bite out of hearing Lady clamber up onto the altar’s surface, the edge off the sound of her fingers fumbling with clasps and buckles.

“You’re off reception duty forever. Can’t even be trusted to vet a phone call. Damn.”

“That’s fair.” Trish flexes her fingers, rolls her shoulders back. Can’t help the pull of her lips into a smirk. “Little harsh on me, but if it makes you feel better, keep taking it out on my hide.”

Lady grunts. Trish folds her hands behind her back, thumb and forefinger winding around her wrist like a chain. She keeps her gaze fixed to the door, unseeing, keeps her breathing shallow, quiet. Like she’s courting a spooked animal. Her diligence only serves to make everything Lady does infinitely louder, drowning out the thump of her heart and the run of her blood. Trish has to stand there, has to take the sound of Lady planting her feet out wide, the snap of elastic as her hooked thumbs catch in the waistband of her panties. The bob of Lady’s throat as she swallows, dry, lands on Trish like the slap she’s long overdue. The wet work of her tongue around her fingers is salt in the wound of Trish’s own making.

It’s agony, but Trish has had worse; Trish can behave. She stares into nothing and thinks of everything, only roused back into the moment when Lady hisses, breath whistling through the grit of her teeth. “Shit,” she pants out, voice shaking, “I can’t.”

“Sure you can,” Trish tells her, the point of her tone severe, but sincere. “Put your back into it.”

“My—” Lady cuts herself off with a groan. “I can’t. I really can’t.”

Even as she says it, she’s still obediently working two long fingers into her tight cunt, the push half-dry, the stretch a burn. Trish squeezes her eyes shut, and digs her nails into her skin, deep and penitent, to keep her feet on the ground.

“What’s stopping you?” Trish asks, when she’s sure her voice will hold steady. “What do you need?”

Lady gasps out, like the air’s been ripped clean from her lungs. “I don’t,” she stammers, “I don’t need— stop, shut up—”

“Can’t get the right angle?” Trish pries. “Fingers too short?”

“Shut up—”

“You strike me as more of a visual person,” Trish persists, splitting the skin on her wrist wide open. “Is that your problem? There’s not a lot in here to work with, but if you’re really going to be that precious, I can set you a mood.”

Lady snarls out an insult, high-pitched and breathy, and Trish cocks a brow as one of the runes dissolves from the door with a sizzle. “Fuck off,” Lady pants out, trying to preempt the jibe she knows Trish well enough to expect is coming, but she’s too late: Trish already has her lips parted around it.

“Well, well. What part of that tipped you over? I need to do it again.”

“Will you die if you don’t shut up?” Lady whines, a yelp jolting out of her mouth when Trish begins to turn her head. “Stop! No looking!”

Trish swivels back around, eyes slotting into place on the runes, though she’s finally at the brink of the point of admitting to herself that she’s just staring right past them. “Whatever lights your fire.”

“Will you only shut up if you actually die?” Lady growls out, frustrated and fraying. The squelch of her fingers inside her hole is obscene when she slides them out, and Trish doesn’t realise she’s holding her breath until it leaves her in a sigh when she hears Lady thrust them back in, as rough as a punishment.

“Maybe. We can find out after you fuck yourself enough to get us out of this room. It’s starting to reek in here. Not you,” she clarifies, languid, “you smell fine.”

“You—”

“You sound just fine too, doll.”

Another rune fizzles, drowned out by the petulant whimper that tumbles off Lady’s tongue.

“Good girl,” Trish praises, wry. “You’re really underselling yourself. From where I’m standing, a night like this with you is worth two dinners.”

“I’m stopping. You can go fuck yourself now.”

Trish clicks her tongue. “Aww— one more? Just one more. Come one more time for me.” She’s being greedy. Two less runes is better than none.

“No, no— I’m done, I’m out. Stop turning around!”

Trish rolls her eyes, exhaling sharply through her nose as she listens to Lady tug her fingers out, before yanking her panties back up artlessly. “I need to turn around to come over to the altar. Are you decent now, your highness? Can we get on with getting the fuck out of this room?”

“Ugh,” Lady gripes, succinct.

Trish takes it as her cue, spinning on her heel. Lady draws her knees up even closer to her chest, arms draped around her calves, lips pinched and brow furrowed. Her thumb and forefinger pluck absently at her sleeve, rolled up to her elbow. Trish wonders if that’s the hand Lady just rode out two orgasms on.

“Cheer up,” Trish comforts, and Lady stops fooling around with her sleeve to flip her the bird, the bridge of her nose crinkling up as she scowls. “It’s not that bad.”

“It is that bad,” Lady complains, almost performatively maudlin. Trish finds herself feeling oddly charmed by it. “Come here, already.”

Trish unhooks her nail from her wrist, bringing it up to her mouth as she saunters over. “It’s not as if you’re keeping anything from me by covering up,” she says, the press of her lips to her skin doing little to muffle the divulgence. “I’ve got a very active imagination.” She releases herself, unravelling her grin as she plants her hands on the altar and hoists herself up. “Think I know what your pussy looks like just from hearing it.”

Lady’s arm arcs like a cracked whip, her hand clapping against Trish’s cheek, open-palmed and lightning quick. Trish’s mouth falls open to mitigate the radiating shock of pain, tongue flicking against the backs of her teeth.

“You deserved it,” Lady argues, the solar flare of her temper already snuffed out.

“...I’ll give you that,” Trish concedes. There’s too far and there’s _too far_ , and she’s not too proud to own when she ghosts over the latter when she only ever intends to caress the former.

Lady snatches her hand back, her teeth clacking together loudly when she digs her chin into her knee. She reaches into her boot and pulls out a jackknife, unfolding the blade and twirling it in her fingers before she holds it out for Trish to take, handle first.

“Read my mind,” Trish says, grateful, as she eases the knife from Lady’s fingers.

“Just hit your carotid artery properly this time.”

“Miss one shot out of a hundred, and suddenly everybody’s a critic.” Trish smirks to herself as she gathers up her hair, pulling it all around to bare the right side of the pale column of her throat. She swallows, and Lady swallows in a perfect little mirror that pulls Trish’s lips wide, the gleam of her teeth peeking out over red.

She swings the blade down, the thrust augmented by an inhuman strength, and the steel sings as it slices cleanly through, flaying the skin wide and sinking all the way down to nick the cartilage of her thyroid. Trish chokes around her breath, slumping forward, arching the cradle of her body to angle the spray and gush of her blood towards the altar. She leaves the knife hilted in her neck, uses the fingers of her hand not holding her hair in place to messily scoop what’s pooled in the cup of her collarbone out onto the stonework.

“You hit your windpipe?” Lady pipes up.

“Not this time.”

“Shame.”

“You should be used to disappointment by now, baby.” Trish grunts, more from the twinge in her back than the gape in her throat. The smell of old smoke signals another rune has dissipated. “Stick your fingers in me. I’m healing too fast.”

“Stick your fingers in yourself!”

“I’ve only got two hands,” Trish protests.

“Ugh.” She takes a peek up at Lady as she shuffles across the altar, and schools her features into a picture of innocence as the other woman looks down at her. “One smart-ass comment,” she warns, “and I pull out.”

“You’re testing me.” Trish heaves in a breath, cringing as Lady pushes two fingers into her wound, turning them onto their side and scissoring them apart. “Shit. Yeah, right there, that’s good.”

“You’re on thin fucking ice.” The venom in Lady’s voice is such a far cry from the antidote of her touch when she brushes Trish’s hair back from her sweat-damp forehead. Trish sags into it, masking the lapse in her composure as a coincidence of the rapid blood loss. It’s a gamble that pays out splendidly when Lady doesn’t shove her away.

The angry throb of her neck with each pulse of her heart starts to blend with the oscillation of Lady’s fingers and the wet sleet of blood on her skin, becoming one monotonous sensation she sinks back into, switches her mind off for. It’s nice. It’s good. It’s something she’s not going to look too deeply into, not going to let get to her, even when Lady hums, the sound strung between discomfort and deliberation, her fingers stutter-stalling.

“Hey,” Trish grouses, her voice a parched rasp, “don’t stop. Keep going. There’s still runes left.”

“I’m cramping up— shut it, shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

Lady exhales exaggeratedly, exasperated. “Fuck, you weren’t kidding about taking hours.”

“I’m almost done,” Trish swears, “and so’s the door.”

Lady pistons her fingers spitefully, wringing out a fraught wail that would’ve embarrassed Trish, if Mundus had ever built in that capacity. “Bleed out already! I want to die. I’m going to kill that shitbag that got away twice.”

Trish steadies her breathing, and risks a look up at her partner through the veil of her hair, smiling like the cat caught with the canary caged between its teeth when their eyes meet. “That’s my good girl.”

When Lady pulls her fingers free in a rush, rips out the knife, and stabs her through the larynx, gagging her with a clotted, moist retch, well. Trish figures Lady’s more than earned the pleasure for all her many, many efforts.


End file.
